24. The Morn Of Zion’S Glory
24
THE MORN OF ZION’S GLORY
The last day of May, Fanny and Jule celebrated their mother’s birthday once more at Jule’s home. Approaching death was very much in the minds of the two old women, and Fanny repeatedly said of Carrie, “I know that she is very near me.” She also claimed “communion of the spirit” with Ira Sankey and said it would be a grand day when she went to heaven to once more “behold the sweet faces” of those she had loved.
In August 1914, Fanny suffered a mild heart attack. She again believed her time had come. During the illness, she had ecstatic visions, and when she was better, she reported that these were the most remarkable of her life. She said very little about their nature, except that in one an angel came to her and said, “Be thou faithful, and I will give thee the crown of life”—an almost word-for-word quotation from the Apocalypse of John. The angel also said, “Be calm and get your strength back as soon as you can, and then go to work for the Master once more.”
Fanny partially recovered, but the doctors told Florence her aunt could not live many more months. Fanny welcomed her approaching end with joy. She was going to “just pass on to the glorious land,” and she told her friends, “When I have arrived at my eternal home, they will say, ‘Come in, Fanny! Come in!’ Then will be the victory through Christ!”
FANNY WELCOMED HER APPROACHING END WITH JOY.
But as the angel had bidden, while life lasted, she still had “work for the Master.” First and foremost, Fanny felt that the angel wanted her to give the world a few more hymns before she departed. Indeed, Allan Sankey and Hugh Main were planning their first major hymnal in a decade and asked Fanny to contribute. In the next few months, she wrote about a dozen hymns. Among the best was “Keep Thou Me.”
In January, the aged Doane, suffering from “creeping paralysis” and bedridden, able to sit up for only a few minutes each day, decided to write one last song. He sent word to his old colleague that he would like her to write the lyrics. In early February, she wrote what was to prove her hymnic swan song:
At evening time it shall be light,
When fades the day of toil away,
No shadows deep, no weary night,
At evening time, it shall be light.
At evening time it shall be light,
Immortal love from realms above
Is breathing now the promise bright,
At evening time it shall be light.
Fanny began to make preparations for her death and burial. She made Florence and Jule promise any memorial in her memory would not be a marble or granite monument, such as Barnum had erected to himself close to her plot, but something that could benefit people. She had several suggestions. The Christian Union had been a concern ever since she had come to Bridgeport, and it needed an infirmary. If her friends felt they had to memorialize her, let them set up a fund in her name to raise money for this.
Or perhaps her friends could found a home for elderly people. Although her own life had been made cheerful by a young family and young friends, she was concerned with the loneliness and emptiness in the lives of so many older people in a society in which the increasing tendency was for children to live apart from their aging parents and grandparents. One elderly widow told her the only time she ever heard a human voice was when the woman she hired to keep house summoned her to a meal. Fanny thought it might be a good thing if elderly people who had no families could live together in a community; this might be a suitable memorial for her.
Or perhaps it could take the form of a fund to help elderly ministers, for whom there was no real pension system in those days. But by no means was any money to be spent on a tombstone or dead marble monument.
Fanny called in a lawyer to draw up a will in which she left half of her estate to Florence, in gratitude for accommodating her for so many years. The other half was to be held in trust by Florence for Jule, an arrangement Fanny decided on because of her sister’s advancing years. When Jule should die, her share would go to Florence.
On February 8, Fanny was visited by a group of mission workers, and she spoke of her life, telling them she was especially concerned with four categories of people: railroad men, policemen, prisoners, and the poor. To the mission workers, Fanny reiterated what she had said all her life about her blindness: “The loss of sight has been no loss to me.”
During her last weeks, Fanny manifested a peculiar phenomenon. Numerous visitors remarked with wonder that her countenance seemed visibly to shine “full of radiant light.” The visible glowing first was observed on isolated occasions as early as 1907, but apparently it became constant in her last days. It was noted by the mission workers and by Rev. H. A. Davenport of the People’s Presbyterian Church, who called on her February 9.
On the tenth, Adam Geibel came, and the two blind musicians played a duet at the piano. On the eleventh, Fanny said she did not feel well and would stay in bed. Her appetite, always so good, had failed. “Tomorrow I shall be well,” she said, and she seemed radiant with joy. All through the day she smiled and kept saying, “I’m so comfortable. I’m so comfortable.”
At nine that night, she sent for Eva Cleaveland and asked her to take down a letter to a neighbor family who had just lost a child, assuring them “your precious Ruth is ‘Safe in the Arms of Jesus.’ ” After completing the letter, she dictated her final testimony to the world:
In the morn of Zion’s glory,
When the clouds have rolled away,
And my hope has dropped its anchor
In the vale of perfect day,
When with all the pure and holy
I shall strike my harp anew,
With a power no arm can sever,
Love will hold me fast and true.
Henry Booth was the last one in the household to retire that night. When he came upstairs at two thirty in the morning, he looked in, as he always did, to see how Aunt Fanny was. She was awake, heard him, smiled, and said gently, “All right, Governor.” At three thirty, Florence heard her aunt walking down the hall. Getting up to assist her, she met Fanny at the doorway to her room. There, to her horror, Fanny fainted in her arms.
Florence carried the meager figure back to bed, awoke her husband and son, and called two doctors. Fanny was oblivious to those around the bedside. Earth seemed to be receding now, “the morn of Zion’s glory” breaking upon her. Florence and Henry were struck by the peace and serenity on her face.
The first of the doctors arrived about four thirty and pronounced her dead of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Florence screamed and burst into tears, sobbing, “It cannot be! It cannot be!” Eva Cleaveland, however, confided in a letter to Bert White, “We have had reason to fear that she might have a long unconscious illness or suffer or something that way, so that it is a comfort to have her go like this.”
According to many witnesses, Fanny Crosby’s was the largest funeral ever seen in Bridgeport, surpassing even that of P. T. Barnum. People stood for blocks to file by the bier. At her right hand was the little silk flag she had always carried. On the casket, at the request of Jule, were engraved the words, My Sister.
George Stebbins, Allan Sankey, and Hugh Main were there. The church was full of the flowers Fanny had loved. The choir sang her favorite hymn, Heber’s “Faith of Our Fathers.” Pastor Davenport prayed at great length. Then the choir sang “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” and “Saved by Grace” as many wept openly.
Dr. Brown, in his eulogy, said, “You have come to pay tribute and to crown a friend. There must have been a royal welcome when this queen of sacred song burst the bonds of death and passed into the glories of heaven.”
Poetic tributes were read. As the congregation filed out, everyone was given a violet. Passing before the bier, they dropped the flowers in until it seemed she was sleeping in a bed of violets.
The rest of Fanny’s associates began to die. On Christmas Eve, Doane succumbed to pneumonia at eighty-four. Three days later, Allan Sankey had a heart attack—a week after his marriage to the widow Anna Underhill Neighams. Eliza Hewitt, after major surgery, died in April 1920. The next year, Kirkpatrick died of a heart attack while writing a hymn. Hugh Main retired; his firm was merged with the Hope Publishing Company of Chicago; he died at eighty-six in October 1925.
George Stebbins lived on in Catskill, New York, continuing to write music and giving a setting to at least one previously unused poem of Fanny’s. He died in October 1945, four months short of his one-hundredth birthday.
Of Fanny’s family, Jule died of cancer at eighty in January 1921; she was Fanny’s last close blood relation. Florence Booth died in 1935, her husband, Henry, in 1946. Adelbert White, after a distinguished career at the University of Nebraska, died in 1951. Eva Cleaveland, her faithful secretary, lived in Bridgeport until 1956.
In 1920, on the one-hundredth anniversary of Fanny’s birth, an infirmary was opened by the Christian Union in memory of its benefactress. Two years later, a twenty-eight-room mansion was endowed in Bridgeport as the Fanny Crosby Memorial Home for aged men and women.
Until 1955, there was nothing to mark Fanny Crosby’s grave except a tiny marble stone with the words Aunt Fanny and the inscription, “She hath done what she could.” Even that was more than she had asked. But on May 1 that year, a large marble slab was erected on her grave because Bridgeport citizens decided the “relatively inconspicuous marker with only vague identification” was unworthy.
The new inscription concludes with a verse from her famous hymn:
Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!
Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!
Heir of salvation, purchase of God,
Born of His spirit, washed in His blood.